Peptech investees pick up grant and knighthood

The day after Peptech celebrated the knighting of its investee company Domantis’ co-founder Dr Gregory Winter, its joint venture partner Biosceptre International was tapped for a $2.1 million START grant to develop a skin cancer therapeutic.

Peptech and Sydney University spinout Biosceptre agreed last year to jointly develop and commercialise two diagnostic products and two therapeutic products based on a specific cancer marker expressed in a broad range of human cancers.

At the time, Peptech executive chairman Mel Bridges said the move marked Peptech’s expansion past therapeutic antibodies -- an anti-TNF antibody is Peptech’s lead project -- to diagnostic and imaging antibodies. The joint venture also broadened Peptech's research scope to include oncology.

The first of these projects – an immunohistochemical diagnostic test using a monoclonal antibody - is expected to be close to market by the end of the year, according to Biosceptre managing director Dr Geoff Cumming. The other projects include the skin cancer treatment, imaging reagents to locate tumours and broadspectrum cancer treatments.

Cumming explained that although the START grant was awarded specifically for the skin cancer application, the research it funds will support the other applications covered by Bioscepter’s joint venture with Peptech.

“We’re looking at a number of actives for the skin cancer product. They include polyclonal and monoclonal antibodies. [This project is] still in lead candidate selection stage,” said Cumming.

“A lot of the research [the START grant] is intended to fund is research that crosses applications – looks at the mode of action of the antibody. The work so far indicates that our antibody is an effective therapeutic – but we want to know how it works and that the target is absolutely specific to cancer.”

Cumming also explained that the advantage of the immunohistochemical diagnostic over the current gold standard -- hematoxylin and eosin (H&E) staining – is that cancers are detectable at an earlier stage as the antibody binds to the cancer target before morphological changes to cells can be picked up.

“The preliminary information we have suggests we can also give an indication about the stage of progression of the cancer and the degree of aggressiveness of the cancer,” he said.

Meanwhile, Domantis co-founder Winter – now Sir Gregory – received a knighthood on the Queen’s birthday honours list in recognition of his contribution to antibody therapeutics.

UK-based Sir Gregory is one of the pioneers of protein engineering and antibody engineering. He is author of a technique for mass-producing humanising antibodies which has been used to bring 15 antibody therapeutics on to the market since the late 1970s, including Herceptin, Synagis and Humira.

In the late 1980s his team at the UK’s Medical Research Council invented domain antibodies (dAbs), the smallest functional unit of full antibodies.

"It is quite delightful to have my work recognized in this way,” said Sir Gregory. “I have been working on antibodies since the mid 1980s and continue to be amazed at how the field has been transformed by protein engineering. I am quite confident that dAbs will be at the heart of the next stage in the antibody revolution.”

Sir Gregory is currently joint head of the Division of Protein and Nucleic Acid Chemistry - Biotechnology at the MRC’s Laboratory of Molecular Biology and Deputy Director of the MRC’s Centre for Protein Engineering, both in Cambridge, UK.